He knocked at eight.
I knew it was him before I got to the door — his knock, his rhythm, the one I'd apparently memorized without meaning to. Except tonight it was slightly different. Same three beats but slower. The knock of someone who had been in a room with Reyes for six hours and had come out the other side of it and needed a minute before the next thing.
I opened the door.
He looked tired in a new way. Not the bone-deep exhaustion of two AM and Mara being gone — something more surface-level but more visible. Like a long day had worn something thin that was usually thicker.
He'd lost the jacket. Back to the hoodie. Sleeves pushed up.
I stepped back from the door.
He came in.
✦
I'd cleaned up since this morning. Not dramatically — I wasn't going to pretend I'd done it for any reason other than the fact that I'd known he was coming. Nursing notes stacked. Mugs put away. The throw blanket on the couch folded into something intentional rather than the evidence of a person who'd been stress-reading pharmacology at midnight.
He noticed. I could tell by the way his eyes moved around the apartment — the same inventory he always did, updated for changes. He didn't say anything about it.
He sat on the couch.
I sat on the other end.
We looked at each other.
"How bad was it?" I asked.
"Define bad."
"Reyes."
He exhaled slowly. Leaned back against the couch. It was the most physically relaxed I'd ever seen him and it still wasn't very relaxed. "She's not shutting down the floor."
"Okay. That's good."
"Conditionally."
"What are the conditions?"
"Tighter protocols. Shorter stays — four months maximum, down from six. More frequent check-ins with residents." He paused. "And a full assessment of the door situation within thirty days."
I looked at him. "What does a full assessment of the door situation mean?"
"It means someone needs to determine definitively what is behind it. What it is. Whether it can be — addressed."
"Addressed," I said. "Like removed."
"Like dealt with in some permanent way, yes." He looked at the middle distance. "They've been wanting this for years. Every time something happens they push for it and I tell them it's not possible without more information and they accept that because the alternative is bringing in people who would make it very loud and very visible and that creates problems for the operation."
"But this time they're not accepting it."
"This time a resident is gone." His jaw tightened. "Mara isn't the first incident. She's the most recent. They're adding them up."
"And the thirty day assessment — that falls to you."
"Yes."
"How do you assess something behind a door you can't open?"
He looked at me. "That's the question."
I pulled my knees up. Thought about it. The clinical part of my brain — the part that made charts and looked for patterns and needed things to fit together — was already turning it over. "What do you actually know about it? Concretely. Facts you're certain of."
He considered that for a moment. Like he appreciated the framing. "It responds to attention. Interest, curiosity, focus directed at it — it registers that and responds."
"How does it respond?"
"Temperature drops. Objects move. The elevator." He paused. "The texts."
"The unknown number."
"Yes. It's been doing that for about two years. Started with residents first. Texts, sometimes just sounds on their phones, words appearing in apps they hadn't opened." He looked at his hands. "I didn't tell Reyes about the texts to your number."
"Why not?"
"Because if I tell her it's reaching outside the fourth floor — outside the building entirely, to someone's personal device — she moves from thirty day assessment to immediate intervention." His voice was even. "And immediate intervention means people in this building with equipment and zero interest in subtlety and the residents get caught in the middle of that."
"So you protected them."
"I protected the operation."
"Luca." I looked at him. "You protected them. You can say that."
He met my eyes. Something in his expression shifted — not quite accepting it, but not refusing it either.
"What else do you know about it?" I asked. Keeping us moving. "Concretely."
"It communicates selectively. Not everyone — specific people. The residents who've been there longest. And—" He stopped.
"And me," I said.
"And you. From significantly earlier than it usually takes." He looked at me directly. "Most residents it takes two, three months before it starts — reaching. With you it started before you'd been in the building a week."
"Why me specifically."
"I don't know."
"Best guess."
He was quiet for a moment. "There's a theory — not mine, something my predecessor left in the operational notes — that it responds to people with a certain kind of attention. Observational. Detail-oriented. People who notice the things other people don't." He paused. "People who are, by nature, very hard to deceive."
I thought about that. "It likes people who notice things."
"It's drawn to them. Whether it likes them is—" He stopped. "I don't know what it feels. I don't know if feel is even applicable."
"The woman who went through the door six years ago," I said carefully. "Your predecessor's assistant. She was like that too?"
"Yes."
"And Mara."
"Mara noticed everything." Something in his voice. Quiet and worn. "She'd been a researcher before. Academic. The kind of mind that couldn't stop pulling threads." He looked at the window. "I should have moved her sooner."
"You said that already."
"It keeps being true."
I looked at him for a moment. "You're doing it again."
"What?"
"Taking all of it onto yourself." I kept my voice even. Not soft — he didn't need soft right now. He needed level. "Mara made a choice. She'd been warned, she knew about the door, she made a choice. That's not yours."
"I'm responsible for the floor—"
"You're responsible for the operation. You're not responsible for every decision every person on that floor makes." I held his gaze. "There's a difference. You know there's a difference."
He looked at me.
For a long time.
The apartment was quiet around us. The city outside doing its thing. The cold corner — I'd stopped pointing it out to myself, it was just a feature now, like the view or the water pressure — doing its usual quiet gathering.
"You're good at that," he said.
"At what?"
"Saying the thing that's actually true instead of the thing that's comfortable."
"Nursing school," I said. "You learn pretty fast that comfortable doesn't help anyone."
Something in his expression. Slow and warm and more unguarded than I'd seen from him outside of two AM emergencies.
"What did Reyes say about me?" I asked.
A pause. "She said you were composed. For someone with no operational background stumbling into this, you were — her word — unnervingly composed."
"I'll take it."
"She also said you were a variable she wasn't sure about yet."
"Because I'm not in the system."
"Because you matter to the floor in a way she doesn't have a category for." He said it carefully. Precisely. Like he'd been thinking about how to word it. "The way it's been responding to you — escalating since you arrived, the texts, the print — she doesn't know if that makes you an asset or a liability."
"What did you say?"
He held my gaze. "I said it made you an asset."
"You said that this morning too."
"I meant it this morning too."
The couch between us. The lamp throwing warm light. His sleeves pushed up and the tiredness sitting on him like weather.
"Luca," I said. Quietly. "What do you think I am?"
He was still for a moment.
"I think," he said, slowly, like each word was being chosen from a very specific shortlist, "that you are the most dangerous kind of person to have in a situation like this."
"Dangerous."
"Because you're not scared enough." He looked at me directly. "You should be more scared than you are. Everything you know about this building, about that floor, about what happened to the people who got too close to that door — you should be keeping your distance. You should be asking me how to break your lease."
"But I'm not."
"But you're not." Something in his voice. "And I don't know if that's because you're brave or because it hasn't fully landed yet or because—" He stopped.
"Because what?"
He looked at me for a long moment.
"Because it's already done something to you," he said quietly. "The way it did to Mara. The way it does to people it's interested in. And you can't feel it happening so you can't—" He stopped again. His jaw tight. "I don't know how to protect you from something that works that way."
The words landed somewhere deep and stayed there.
"Is that what's been keeping you up?" I asked. "Not just the floor. Me."
He said nothing.
Which was the loudest yes I'd ever heard from him and I'd heard a lot of loud yeses from his silences by now.
"Luca." I turned toward him slightly. "I'm not Mara. I'm not your predecessor's assistant. I'm not going to walk toward the door." I held his gaze. "I'm going to walk toward the information. There's a difference."
"Sometimes they're the same path."
"I know. I'll tell you when I can't tell them apart anymore." I paused. "That's what I'm for, right? Another set of eyes. Someone to notice the things you're too close to see."
He looked at me. "That's not all you're for."
The sentence sat between us.
Simple. Quiet. And underneath it something that hadn't been said yet and was taking up all the space anyway.
Neither of us moved.
The lamp hummed. The city hummed. The cold corner was still.
I was aware of the distance between us on the couch in the specific way you became aware of distance when it started feeling like a decision rather than just geography.
His eyes dropped — just for a second, barely perceptible, the kind of thing I would have missed three weeks ago before I'd learned to read the small controlled movements of his face. To my mouth. Then back up.
There and gone.
I felt it like a change in pressure.
Neither of us said anything.
Neither of us moved.
The not-moving had weight to it now. The conscious quality of two people making the same choice from opposite ends of it — the choice to stay exactly here, exactly this close, exactly this still, because moving in either direction meant something and neither of us was ready for what it meant.
Or maybe — and this was the thought that sat in my chest and glowed — maybe we were both ready and that was exactly the problem.
His phone buzzed.
On the coffee table, face up, the screen lighting with a notification.
We both looked at it.
Building alert. Fourth floor. Access point triggered — 11:47 PM.
The elevator.
Someone — or something — had just activated the fourth floor access.
Luca was on his feet before I'd fully processed it. The composure back, fully, immediately — the switch from almost-something to operational in under a second, which was impressive and also, in this specific moment, extremely annoying.
He looked at me. "Stay here."
"Luca—"
"I mean it this time. Stay here, lock the door, don't use the fob." His voice was even and urgent and final. "I'll be back."
"What triggered it?"
"I don't know yet."
"Could it be Mara coming back?"
Something moved through his expression. Hope and doubt in equal measure, there and gone. "Maybe. I need to check."
He moved to the door. Opened it. Turned back.
And the thing on his face — the thing in the half-second before he turned away — was the most unguarded I'd ever seen him. Unfiltered. The composure completely absent for just that moment, just that sliver of time between one thing and the next.
It looked, in the warm light of my apartment, a lot like someone who was leaving somewhere they didn't want to leave.
"I'll be back," he said again. Quieter this time.
"I know," I said.
He left.
The door clicked shut.
I sat on the couch in the sudden silence of my apartment and pressed my fingers to my mouth and breathed.
The lamp hummed.
The cold corner gathered, soft and familiar.
On the coffee table his phone notification still glowed.
Fourth floor. Access point triggered.
I looked at the fob on my bedside table.
Looked at the door.
Looked at the fob.
"Don't," I told myself.
I stayed on the couch.
For approximately four minutes.
Then my phone buzzed.
Unknown number.
One message.
he won't find anything up there.
I stared at it.
he won't find anything up there.
Which meant the access trigger wasn't Mara.
Which meant something had tripped the elevator sensor deliberately.
Which meant Luca was on the fourth floor right now looking for something that wasn't there.
Which meant—
I looked at the cold corner of my apartment.
Which had been silent all evening.
Which was still silent now.
Which was the specific silence of something that wasn't there anymore.
The hair on my arms stood up.
I grabbed my phone.
Me: Luca. It's not on the floor. It triggered the elevator to get you up there. It's not—
I stopped typing.
Looked at the cold corner.
At the print on the wall.
Hanging completely straight. Perfectly still.
Not tilted. Not moved.
Still.
The specific stillness of something that didn't need to move anymore because it had already moved somewhere better.
I stood up slowly.
The temperature in my apartment had dropped. Not gradually — all at once, the way it dropped in the hallway on the fourth floor. Cold and immediate and directional, coming from—
The front door.
Not the corner.
The front door.
Something was in the hallway.
Right outside my apartment.
I stood in the middle of my living room and did not move and thought, with the clinical clarity of someone whose training had just taken over from their body: I locked the deadbolt. I locked the deadbolt when he left. I locked—
The handle moved.
Slowly. The specific incremental rotation of someone — something — testing whether it was locked.
It was locked.
The handle stopped.
Silence.
Then — three knocks.
Not Luca's rhythm.
Slower.
Patient.
Like something that had all the time in the world and knew I wasn't going anywhere.
I looked at my phone. Typed with hands that were steadier than they had any right to be.
Me: Luca. Something is outside my door.
Sent.
I stared at the door.
Three more knocks.
Same rhythm. Patient. Unhurried.
My phone buzzed.
Luca: DO NOT OPEN IT
Luca: I'm coming
Me: I'm not opening it
Me: Luca it knocked
Me: it knocked like a person
I backed up. One step, two. Until my back was against the far wall, the full length of the apartment between me and the door.
The knocking stopped.
Silence.
Then — right at the base of the door, in the thin gap between wood and floor — the cold. Seeping through. Deliberate. Slow.
Like something pressing its face against the gap to see inside.
I pressed my back against the wall and looked at the thin line of cold spreading across my floor and thought, with perfect clinical clarity—
It knows exactly where I am.